Tag: PF

Georgia Tech’s logo is flawed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  To someone like me, there is beauty in symmetry; my personal view on aesthetics is typically favoring towards things with good balance.  I like the concept of balance outright, usually believing that a life well lived is a life that’s simply got good balance throughout the numerous aspects of living.

Working where I do, I see the Georgia Tech logo pretty much every single day.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that I support Virginia Tech and that without fail I will get stuck behind a deliberately troll-driving GT shuttle on a daily basis, I have grown to have a negative connotation whenever I see the GT logo; which is everywhere.  Which has made me become critical towards it, naturally.

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I don’t mean this in the long run

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

But right now, I kind of hate my family.  I kind of hate all Koreans for that matter.  The feeling will obviously eventually subside, and we’ll all find some sort of compromise to living again eventually, but at this very moment, I’m kind of pissed off at life, and I have only my family to thank for that.

Does this make me sound selfish?  Yeah sure, but I’m coming to the conclusion to a potential personal belief that everyone needs to have some selfish in them in order to prevent themselves from missing out on well, life.

During the tail end of my latest miserable visit up to Northern Virginia, the place where I grew up and now the place I dread going to more than jury duty or a workload of 380+ slide PowerPoints, the family was having another argument.  Typical Korean story bullshit, but then my mom pipes in that she now “gets” why the grandparents in Korean dramas are always pining for themselves to finally just die, so that they could alleviate the burden of their existence of their struggling children.

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There are times when I resent being Korean

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I wish my parents would go back to Korea, just so they could stop using their inability to have learned competent basic English as an excuse to be irresponsible and push the burden of their woes onto my sister and I. It sounds terrible, but I sometimes believe that if the monumental, albeit imaginary, language and cultural barrier didn’t stand in front of them, my parents might be able to take care of their own bullshit as opposed to heaping the responsibilities onto their children.

I understand the value of family and that we’re all supposed to be there for one another unconditionally, but in order for things to genuinely have any remote shot at success, all lines of communication must be open, and there has to be a mutual respect and acceptance that exists from all parties involved. I have no problem with helping my family or other people in general, because I like to imagine myself as a fairly decent person at the core, but it gets to a point where people that people who don’t help themselves are beyond any external help. That’s how I feel about my family sometimes, and it makes me feel genuinely lousy.

The story goes like this: Second-generation Koreans emigrate to the United States to do some sort of blue-collar work, whether it’s something agricultural or something more mundane like dry cleaning or operating a liquor store. I can’t say that I necessarily understand the rationale behind it, but often times the justification is “for the kids,” and often times “to have a better life.” The third generation of Koreans are essentially raised as Americans with as much Korean ideals as they are forcibly engrained with. In the perfect ending to this story, they become successful and make a boatload of money to where they can support their aging parents through the remainder of their lives as well as sustaining themselves and produce the next generation and sustain them too, with hopes that they will repeat the cycle, however theoretically from a higher starting point.

But the world ain’t perfect, and we live in reality. There aren’t nearly enough happy endings.

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Reality redefined

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

What an Asian household is like for little Hyun-Soo Choo, now that League of Legends players are going to now be recognized as professional athletes.

Hyun-Soo Choo sits in his room playing the piano, practising The Moonlight Sonata. His head is rhythmically rolling from side to side as he lets his mind get lost in the melody and the slow, methodical strokes of the ivory keys.

Mom: (Screaming from downstairs) Hyun-Soooooo!  [Time for League of Legends practice!]*

*[Translated from the Korean – dh]

Hyun-Soo:  Ommaaaa (“Mom” in Korean) I don’t want to play Leagueeee!!
Mom:  Hyun-Soo!  [Right now!]
Hyun-Soo:  Ommmaaaaaa…….
Mom:  HYUN-SOO!!!

Defeated, Hyun-Soo closes the cover to the keys of his piano and begins stomping his way downstairs, begrudgingly.  His mother is waiting at the bottom of the stairs with her hands on her hips, with a handheld dust brush in her left hand.  She has a stern and fierce look on her face.

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The most valuable parking space

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It should come as no surprise, but I’m very much a creature of habit. Repetition doesn’t really faze me like it fazes others, and I can go numerous periods of time eating the same things, doing the same activities and seeing the same programs for probably more than the average person does. I like routine, and I like there to be some degree of normalcy and repetition in my life; it’s comforting, effortless, and once engrained, simply a part of daily living. Maybe this is to say that I’ve got a facet of my brain that’s possibly autistic or at least obsessive-compulsive, due to this desire for routines and repetition.

This is no more obvious than the fact that I’m bothered probably way more than I should be when things nudge me off my routine or my expected courses of actions. Whether it’s another person’s complete lack of spatial awareness that causes them to aimlessly walk and consume space which encroaches on my line, or a person that coincidentally happens to be at the workout station that I was planning on using next, and I’ve already accomplished all my other lifts, people that disrupt my rhythm aggravate the ever living shit out of me.

But the worst of all perpetrators to me are the people that insist on taking the parking space that I’ve been trying to park in consistently for almost three years now. It is evident now that my preferred parking space is clearly the most valuable parking space in the entire fucking lot, based on how many people insist on having it now. But seriously, my days become monumental emotional uphill battles on mornings in which I can’t get my parking spot. Nothing infuriates me worse or faster than seeing that some motherfucker has gotten to it before I did, and I feel nothing but unadulterated anger for the few minutes it takes me to find another not-as-adequate-but-passable parking space.

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I do my best thinking in the car

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I really do. It’s like I do my best typing when I’ve got my feet kicked up on my desk, and I have the wireless keyboard in my lap. I don’t know why that is, but I feel like my fingers fly along the keys when it’s in this position. But back to the topic of thinking, I guess “best” isn’t necessarily the best word, but it’s true that I do some of my deepest thinking while I’m driving in my car.

Lately, something that pops into my head a lot, which is probably obvious given my age and life’s status, but I’m kind of a lonely person. I’m probably being more earnest than I really should be, given the fairly public status of my brog, but to put it out there, I’m 31 years old, and I haven’t been on a date in about two years now. Ultimately, there’s nobody to blame for such circumstances except for myself, but to be perfectly honest, I kind of don’t even know where to begin.

It’s not like I can go to Publix and be all like “oh, you’ve got one item? Please, go ahead” in the checkout line, and strike up a scintillating conversation with a random stranger, culminating with the birth of a blossoming relationship. No, it would result in us holding up the checkout line, people behind us getting pissed, the cashier getting impatient with our inconsiderate behavior, and a girl, who capitalized on my generosity getting the fuck out of the place even sooner because I was being a mush.

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Yeah, no regrets

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My last post over at Talking Chop went up yesterday, and I thought that I would feel a little bit emotional over it, since it was my primary sports writing-related outlet I had over the last four years, but I really didn’t.  To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really remember to check it until late last night, so in some respects that kind of was indicative of how much I had already kind of checked out when it came to the whole site entirely.  I probably felt more emotions while in the process of writing my farewell statement, which I started on Tuesday and re-read and edited throughout the course of the week.

I’ve got no regrets in doing it, now that it’s done.  It’ll really sink in on Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, when I’ll be sitting at my desk thinking “oh shit, I have to write my column,” but then realize that I actually don’t, and then I’ll feel a sense of relief wash over my like an awesome wave.

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